Great pics, JMH and glasater! Thank you for making the effort to take them and share them.

It seems to me that most of the tea parties I've seen photos of were very similar to the Austin one I attended - peaceful, enthusiastic, lots of great homemade signs, lots of great people. Just what I would have hoped for!

I loved seeing your photos too. When I got home, I decided the trick to getting decent people pix must be keeping your shutter in constant motion! Doesn't it just kill you to reduce your photos for the web? The panorama (thanks to Photoshop's much improved photo merging app) would have been 23 feet long at internet resolution. The amphitheater setting made it much easier on a photographer, but it also meant that the meet and greet here was more inward looking pep rally than noticeable street presence.

Random thoughts on Tea Party Day:

I'm going to send some pix to our regional activists to use on their website, which already had that abandoned feel two weeks ago. Hopefully they were just too busy putting together the Tax Day venue/events..... I've even bitten the bullet and signed up for Facebook. Like the video games that my kids were apparently born knowing how to play, alas, it looks like you're supposed to know how Facebook works intuitively.

One of the psychic impediments my inner protester had to vanquish was a vision of 12 lonely people standing on a corner shouting into the wind. Seeing photos from all over the country made a pivotal difference. It didn't hurt that people showed up in the hundreds either. When I wrote up photo captions for general consumption though, I had to remind myself that the two guys in one of my favorites would probably not appreciate being called Darryl and his brother Darryl.

Every time Democrats win elections, they start seeing portents of a Republican death spiral. But Protest Babes (and babies) were spotted here, so the Tea Party future is clearly looking good. Protest Pups somehow seem auspicious too -- I meant to do a cropped close up of the beagle, but never mind. I'm hoping the young professional crowd was too busy at work to attend, but that's a constituency the right seriously needs to work on cultivating.

I was glad to see the local "community organizers" taking names. Interestingly, they had a multiple sign-up sheets -- one was aimed at socially conservative hot button issues, for instance, another for the NC Tea Party list which seems more oriented to financial and governmental issues. Such groups usually develop independently of each other, which suggests another Tea Party plus.

Follow-up seems key; it's significant that so many of these folks (including me) have never come out before and are just now discovering that other like minded locals really do exist. A post-protest nexus on the web for building on such connections locally & nationally looks like it could finally supply the right wing's organizational missing link (so to speak!). It gives the real grass roots a way to pressure the Republican party, not just Congress collectively, as well as potentially influencing public opinion.

If this nascent movement can sustain itself and pick up steam, it may ultimately even influence the mainstream press, and thus the wider electorate. The story has to get too big to ignore before they finally start paying attention to the real particulars, instead of brushing them off. Call it the Iraq Dynamic: bad news (death sprials) can be reported right away, the (media) jury stays out on the good news till it becomes an undeniable "trend." I was interested to see that salt of the earth folks in my neck of the woods believe that Fox News is On Their Side every bit as emphatically as folks on the left and in the media do! BTW, did ya'll read that Rahm Emanuel watches Special Report every day?

Almost forgot! In honor of TM and the denizens of JOM, my sign read: It's the Math, Stupid.

It gets more disturbing when you see the Flag in full, I think. The combination of "STOP HIM" and a red star right in the middle of Obama's forehead is a really ill conceived kind of symbolism, IMO. If I had really made that connection before I got home, I would have spoken to the flag bearer about it.

A professional photographer and media outlets would find that shot irresistible, much to our detriment, I fear. I actually hesitated to put it in the slideshow (which if Typepad cooperates should be LUN for the time being), but it was there, on prominent display. Maybe it will help suggest that folks be on the lookout, not just for provocateurs from the left, but for what are sure to be self-inflicted wounds, some of which may be more immediately obvious.

It probably doesn't help that the guy holding the flag looks like he could be a retired sniper either. That otherwise unremarkable angle never crossed my mind though, till I started thinking about what an unsympathetic press could make of it. Ironically, that look, complete with reflector sun glasses, is actually part of what I like so much about the head on view of the same guys as sort of four four man honor guard proudly standing duty at the top of the bleachers.

Alas, the attempt to tar the right with the Timothy McVeigh's of the world, is going full steam yet again. The timing of that DHS "report" dovetails too nicely with the preferred, alt universe, narrative for comfort, or belief, really, but the flag would have made me uneasy in any case. I'm only sorry that I was a little too wrapped up in my own "mission" to ask about at the time.

Speaking of symbols, the man in the protest pup photo was wearing a t-shirt with the yellow hammer & sickle preceded by the letter A and followed by white looks like I U, and I wonder if anyone knows the intended meaning of the acronym.